Dutch Van Kirk: Enola Gay Navigator Discusses Atomic Bomb Drop on Hiroshima [14:36]

YouTube ^ | August 6, 2025 | Witness to War

[SunkenCiv]

Having been chosen as a navigator to deliver the atomic bomb, Dutch Van Kirk recalls the precautions that were taken to ensure his aircraft would not be harmed by the blast. Comparing the differences between the B-17 aircraft he flew in over Europe and the B-29 he flew in delivering the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima, Dutch gives a detailed account of his mission on August 6, 1945. 

Dutch Van Kirk: Enola Gay Navigator 
Discusses Atomic Bomb Drop on Hiroshima | 14:36 
Witness to War | 526,511 views | August 6, 2025

 

• Last Surviving Crew Member Has 'No Regrets' About Bombing Hiroshima [08/14/2018]

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TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: dutchvankirk; enolagay; godsgravesglyphs; hiroshima

[SunkenCiv]

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.

[SunkenCiv]

[Texan4Life]

No Regrets. Japan was fighting and waging Total War.
And it took the Total effect of A-Bombs to get Japan to stop and admit defeat and surrender, unconditional.

[ryderann]

Dutch was 24 years old when he did this. Compare that to so many of today’s 24 year olds.

[nuke_road_warrior]

Thank you Dutch, after about nine months in combat in Europe, my dad was slated for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.

[cpdiii]

My dad would have been part of the invasion. If such I might be here today. The atomic bomb and the second convinced Japan to surrender. They thought we had many others at the ready. We did not. We did have a continuous assembly going and, in a few months, could have atomized them with will.

[albie]

My dad was in Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941. He was 21. Also in the Korean War and did 2 tours in Vietnam. Definitely a different breed of men in those days.

[SunkenCiv]

Yup. 45 cities were burned to the ground via conventional incidiary bombing.

No surrender.

Then Hiroshima.

Still no surrender.

Took a second a-bomb.

In addition, they didn’t have any complaint coming.

If there hadn’t been surrender at that point, more a-bombs were in the pipeline for a cadence reaching out to about December ‘45.

After the final defeat, the rest of Asia would have cheered, then visited long enough to piss on the ashes.

If anything, Japan got off light.

[SunkenCiv]

It’s easy to stand in awe of that generation, and other earlier generations for that matter.

[Mr. K]

The entire country was taught and ordered to fight to the death.
The A bomb stopped that.

[normbal]

Thank God for men such as these,

My dad, a medic, was on board a troop ship en route to Okinawa just days out from San Francisco when the first bomb was dropped on HIroshima.

Within weeks of arriving he traveled to the city where he took hundreds of photos. I can recall watching his Kodachrome slide shows of his 4 years in the Pacific islands (Guam, Okinawa, Philippines, others) but the most memorable of these were of the devastation he witnessed in Hiroshima - every film was just a little hazy from the residual background radiation.

He dealt with many entrenched Japanese (never could break him of the habit of calling them nips, Germans “Krauts”) throughout the islands, going out on search and destroy missions looking for snipers, soldiers holed up in caves with teams armed with flamethrowers, WP grenades, the usual weapons of war to make the islands safe. Those photos he only showed when his “old Army buddies” would pop in over the decades.

Don’t know what happened to all those slides, my sister probably took them (along with his guns and mementos) when he died.

[Paal Gulli]

In the video he mentions Cpt Parsons arming the bomb en route. That wasn't the original plan but he improvised because he'd seen one too many B-29s crash trying to take off from Tinian, most of them caught fire, and 9000 gallons of burning AvGas makes a pretty indelible impression. Parsons didn't much care for the idea of being stuck in a burning plane with an atomic bomb in it, so he decided to "inert" the bomb by removing the primer charge pre-flight and re-installing it once they were well off the ground.

But the bomb wasn't designed to be serviced after loading in the bomb bay, and there was no official procedure, so Parsons spent most of the day before the mission uninstalling and re-installing the detonator and making notes on the procedure so he wouldn't miss a step when it was show-time.

The bomb rack was pretty tight quarters so Parson's arms were pretty well bruised and bloodied when he was done.

[GingisK]

...more a-bombs were in the pipeline...

Only three were made. The process of making fissionable material in those days was slow.

[Vermont Lt]

How old do you think the pilots and navigators over Iran are?

There are plenty of good 24 year old Americans.

[ryderann]

Did you notice that I said “so many of today’s 24 year olds”?

[Paal Gulli]

"Only three were made. The process of making fissionable material in those days was slow."

There was a third plutonium "pit" waiting at Los Alamos, which would have made for the fourth atomic bomb, and it was already packaged and prepared for shipment to Tinian. But it never left the facility because Truman signed an order on the 12th of August that the bombing was to stop.

U-235 was (and still is) slow to produce but Pu-239 was not. At one juncture the plant at Oak Ridge was burning one-seventh of all the commercial electricity produced in the US to power all the centrifuges and gaseous diffusers they were running, and they only created enough U-235 for the one device. On the other hand, once the two atomic reactors Groves had had built in Washington were up to full speed (in about December of '45), they produced enough Pu-239 each month for four more bombs.

The order written by FDR (not Truman) stated that until Japan capitulated, they were to continue dropping atom bombs on Japan as soon as they became available. So if Japan hadn't surrendered, there was the potential that by January of 1946, the US could have been nuking one Japanese city a week like clockwork.

Or they could have turned the show over to Curtis LeMay. He had just inherited 10,000 bombers from the War in Europe, which gave him the firepower to run hundreds of napalm sorties on Japan, every day, seven days a week.

[telescope115]

My dad was in the Philippines at the time. My father-in-law was on Titian when Enola Gay took off with the bomb. Both in the Army, they definitely would’ve been a part of an invasion force.

My dad WAS part of the occupation force after the war.

Both came home safe and sound.

[telescope115]

If anything, Japan got off light.

Yes. To his dying day Dad hated the Japanese.

Most of my uncles were in the Pacific. One survived Iwo Jima, another was wounded at Guadalcanal.

If I could turn back the clock I would love to get an account from each of them of their experiences. Not sure they would all talk about them, however.

[Paal Gulli]

Near the end of the novel, “Unbroken,” about Louis Zamperini, he tells about the day (after Nagasaki) when the Japanese guards deserted his prison camp. Then the American bombers came and started dropping food and medicine by parachute on the prison camps.

Once they got the bulk of their fellow prisoners healthy enough to travel, they decided to “self-rescue” by boarding a public Japanese train to where they expected to find the nearest Allied encampment.

Zamperini mentions that on that trip there were no males anywhere except infants and sickly old men because all the rest had been conscripted. Even toddlers were being trained to pull little red wagons with ammunition from fighting point to fighting point. Adolescents were being taught to fight with sharpened bamboo sticks, or to lie hidden in “spider holes” with explosives strapped to them, waiting for an Allied armored vehicle to pass over them.

What struck me was that this was an independent, eye-witness account that even after the 2nd atomic bombing, the people of Japan were still determined to fight on.

The only reason they stopped fighting was their Emperor told them to.